Pat Gelsinger, Senior VP of the Digital Enterprise Group, continued the days keynotes with announcements of new technologies for the digital enterprise. In his new role, Gelsinger talked about Intels plans to further innovate at the enterprise level by introducing technologies that primarily help businesses grow with lower risks and decreased costs.

One of the technologies disclosed in IDF was Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT), the latest addition to Intels group of *T technologies. I/OAT approaches the problem of I/O overhead at the platform level, with subtle changes and optimizations in the NIC (Network Interface Controller), CPU, chipset and software. This approach reduces the workload on the processor while accelerating the flow of data by utilizing the chipset and network controller to move data in and out of memory. Besides that, Intel also optimized the TCP/IP protocol for Intel-based servers which further free more resources and cutting the processors workload.

I/OAT is implemented at the platform level, including optimizations to the CPU, chipset, network controller and software.

Overall, Intel expects this platform approach to optimizing I/O will achieve at least a 30% speedup in data exchange between the platform and applications  effectively giving the processor more resources to spend on other critical computing tasks.

Intel is also working with Microsoft to provide native support for I/OAT in future Windows Server releases and the technology is expected to be delivered with the upcoming Bensley (dual core Xeon DP) platform in 2006.

I/OAT is not only applied to the networking component, but can also be used in server storage as well. Last month, Intel introduced I/OAT in their latest Intel IOP333 storage processor which accelerates RAID 6 throughput and reliability. With I/OAT, the system will continue to operate at the highest performance levels even when attempting to recover from multiple disk failures.